The Midterm Win Could Make the Democrats Worse - Sam Harris

This was always the war we should have waged, but we have complete incompetence in charge. At a certain point you have to recognize that there's evil in the world. Last but not least, there are people in the MAGA calls to understand that. I don't want to make this a round war argument episode, but you're not representing my point correctly. The path to fascism in America is for the left to get sufficiently crazy. I fear that the ideologues on the left get captured more of the conversation. There's a very real possibility now that you're going to get a woken as like you haven't seen before. Don't you think? I'm worried about that. If it's a forced choice between L. Sayed and Nick Fuentes, I think we go right in this country between fascism and communism, America picks fascism 100 times out of 100. Before we start, a very quick movie recommendation. We know our audience, and every so often something comes along that we think you'll genuinely want to see. Confession is written by Ben Shapiro and stars Rob Lowe, James Franco and Nick Nolte. Set in Moscow in 1938, a former literature professor is arrested and brought to the infamous Lubanka prison charged with conspiring with his dissident priest. There, he faces interrogation by his brilliant but brutal former student. If you care about the things we talk about on this show, like Freedom of Conscience, this one will resonate with you. Confession is now streaming only on the Daily Wire. Join to watch at dw.com/confession. Thanks to the Daily Wire for sponsoring this episode. Sam Harris, welcome back to Trigonon Trey. Good to see you both. It's great to see you. It's good to see you. It's a very interesting moment in America. The midterms happened last week. Huge changes. I thought for me personally, having known you for a while and us having had a number of conversations, having had you explain your position to Trump in detail. To me, the part of the irony is, it seems that he's been undone by prosecuting something on which you actually probably agree with him, which is dealing with the threat of Islamist radicalism. Yeah. This is a painful irony. Just drink in the, what's it being called now, Trump and Freud, as fully as I might because the thing that people are most disillusioned by, his former fans, or most disillusioned by, like it's one of the maybe two things he's done that I think I can defend, so the other one being close in the border. So yeah, there's an irony there. I mean, the thing that meant to make that less obscure, the thing that people seem to most hate him for, is the war, the war of choice in Iran, and I think that's the war of choice that we could have defensively waged more or less at any point in the last 47 years. Right? And so, I mean, he's done it badly, he's communicated about it abysmally, he's shown some spine and then shown perfect spinelessness, he's lied, and I mean, his messaging has just been deranged as I would have expected, but the truth is, even now, I still hold out some hope that if he just, you know, doesn't declare defeat unequivocally, the regime may at fall, right? I mean, the economic pressure may be further military, I don't know what's going to happen next week, but there's rumors of, you know, further military pressure coming. It's possible that there's a good and defensible outcome even now, but, you know, the critics of this war can certainly be understood to, to, in their, in their perception of this being a disaster in the making, because it, it, it has been disastrous. I mean, just to take one piece from, told the, the people of Iran to rise up and reclaim their country that help was on the way and then stood by as tens of thousands of people and massacred, right? So it's just, I mean, that is, that were the only error that's hard to, hard to recover from, but, you know, he's compounded that with just one humiliation of our country after the next. But still, it's, you know, this is an evil regime that has been needlessly emiserating us on people. We should, you know, the, the women of Iran are absolute heroes, and I would actually was just with, I just saw Masih Alinajad, you know, the, the, the, the, the, on his ship down your podcast. Yeah. Um, she's fantastic, you know, the, the Iranian regime, I think it's tried to kill her three times in the US. This was always the war we should have waged, but we should, you know, we have complete incompetence in charge who, in the case of Trump really don't have principles. I mean, he's just, you know, he, I think he thought this was, there was going to be an easy decapitation strike. Um, and it, you know, it's understandable that he did think that. I mean, when you can drop a bomb and, and, you know, take out several tears in the org chart of the Iranian regime, it's, it's easy just to hope that that would, that would have been enough to take out the regime, but it clearly wasn't. I mean, it's just, uh, fanatics all the way down. So anyway, so that's just to say that, that my gloating about the unraveling of, of, uh, Trumpistan is, um, tempered by my, my sense that many of the people who are disillusioned, uh, are disillusioned for the, so primarily for the wrong reasons. Um, well, we may be come back to that, but one of the other things that I thought is interesting is corruption is a big part of the conversation that has caused people to become elinated from the, the MAGA movement. And that's something you raised with us in the past. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you want to talk us through a little bit of what people mean when they talk about corruption, some of the, the cases and details. Well, again, I think it, you know, I was on, I think exactly a year ago last time and I think we spoke about that a lot. But I mean, he's, he, even then, I mean, since then he's, he's earned, I think more billions. But, um, I mean, the level of, of self dealing is just astounding. I mean, he, the, the, the, the crucial thing to recognize is that Trump, unlike any other president we've ever had, views the, the, the, the levers of American power as his personal property to be worked or even, you know, nullify, you know, trade it away, um, for just personal advantage or the advantage of his friends and family. So he's, he's used tariff policy, he's used foreign policy, um, to just create a cash register for himself and his friends and as recently as, uh, was a month ago announced that, I mean, you know, you know, sooner put sanctions on any country that would deal with Russian oil, then he broke those sanctions himself by announcing a diesel deal, uh, which was, obviously, kind of advantage, um, friends and family, uh, in his particulars. And so it's, it's some, again, I'm, I'm very happy that Republicans or, you know, you know, former Trump fans are starting to react to this. But, you know, it's, again, it's, it's a mixed feeling because I, you know, what took them so long when this, so this was, uh, it's been obvious for a decade who this guy was. I mean, the level of, of, um, avarice and I mean, it's all about him and his advantage. I mean, all he wants is money and fame. And I mean, that's, that's clearly, uh, it's been true for as long as we've known him. And that's, and we've known him for decades, and long before even, uh, his, his political aspirations were articulated. I mean, he was just this, this grift in self-promoting lunatic and he didn't change as a person by, looking into power and what happened I can to remind you, your listeners of, um, my view of this, I mean, he is, he's a game show host who was successfully marketed as a business genius to tens of millions of credulous Americans who watched 14 seasons of the apprentice. And that worked. We have a country that bought that lie. I mean, he was not a business genius. Uh, he was nothing like even a, a brilliant real estate developer. He was not even among the most prominent real estate developers in New York. He was a, he was just this branding guy who, again, became a game show host. And, and he's, and he's in his defense, he's funny and he's entertained. He's not boring, right? So like boredom is, is, you know, the original sin, I guess, uh, to, to be avoided at all costs. So it's, um, he succeeds there where many politicians clearly don't, right? It's the fact that he could just cut through the Republican party in, you know, in 2016 with a, a side, um, that was due to the fact that all these guys were stiffs and he wasn't. And, um, he could see it. So, and, I mean, perversely, his, his craftness, his, his total lack of moral center, his, his obliviousness to facts or even logic, his shamelessness at, at, at even contradicting that the sentence he spoke, you know, moments ago. I mean, there's total, you know, there's supernaturally capacity to be in embarrassed for himself. That is a kind of superpower because it reads to many, many millions of Americans. Apparently, again, I'm still astonished that we're even here to talking about this man as authenticity. I mean, he's authentically an awful person, and that's better than being a hypocrite. They think most people in power are hypocrites. They're really awful, but they're pretending to be good. They're sanctimonious assholes, and they're judging you from their elitist perch in their institutions. That is the thing to which most Americans are 51% of Americans at the time were fatally allergic. Trump is better than all of that because at least he's authentically a cheeseburger eating fake. He's authentically a fake. There's a weird postmodern structure. People have compared this to professional wrestling with K-fabe, what's fake, and what's real. The imposter is part of the entertainment, but the spectacle has priced in the fact that this is not real violence. It's not real wrestling. In some sense, his fans always flattered themselves that they were in on the con. They were willingly being conned by this con man. It was fun and funny, and they're owning the lips all the while. They didn't bother them because it really bothered the lib tards, so we're just now just getting drunk on liberal tears. The fact you're listening to an in-depth discussion like this one tells us you're exactly the kind of listener who'd enjoy a show built it entirely around that level of detail. That is exactly the audience a show called Unpacking Israeli History is built for. It's hosted by Dr. Noan Weissman and educated to spend his entire career studying and teaching Israeli history. Each episode walks through the people, events, and decisions that shaped modern Israel from the earliest roots of Zionism through to today. What makes a work is that Weissman isn't trying to tell you what to think. He digs into where the narratives actually differ, and he brings on guests who don't all agree with each other or with him, from journalists who live retic good to Palestinian activist Ahmed Furt al-Kateeb. We all know podcasts can go either way. This one held our attention. It doesn't rush the story to get to a neat conclusion, and that's rare than it should be. Search Unpacking Israeli History on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts, or click the link in the description to start listening. You don't think the character of the president matters, right? He's the most powerful man in the world. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I was going to say, perhaps we steal man, not look, the people who voted and supported Trump will be in many different camps. All the way from, you know, he's the greatest thing ever, to I'm a Republican. I have to vote for a nominee, to I'm a swing voter. And this is where, for me, it's interesting. And you make the point, you know, the personality of the person who's the most powerful man in the world is really important. A lot of people, I think, made the calculation. The bad personality is not as bad as bad policy. And I remember having a conversation with you, I think, on Billious Podcasts, we were both guests at the time where we kind of agreed. We're not kind of agreed, but I think you remember you saying the phrase, if liberals don't police the border fascists will. And I think that was the choice at the time. I was a binary choice. And to many people, not particularly welcome one. But if you have a country where you have literally 10 million people coming in illegal over the previous presidency, what are people supposed to do? I think that's where a lot of people were. No, I think that's a fair. It is fair. It's, it's defensible. I mean, it was not quite defensible at the moment. You had to pull the lever to vote in, in 2024. Because by that point, it was clear the Democrats had gotten the message that, okay, we have to, we have to end the zombie movie at the border, right? This is, this is untenable. Biden was trying that Bill was getting blocked by Republicans who cynically wanted to maintain this issue into the election. So it was, I don't think Kamala Harris was going to let the border unravel in the same way. But, oh, yeah, I mean, you know, Biden's first day in office is his first act as president was to pass an executive order that, you know, trans to the bathrooms and, and, and unravel Trump's policy at the border, right? So those, those, those were 80, 20 issues. And he grabbed the thin end of both of those issues, his first day in office. So if those were, if those were, you're a super stimuli, as they were for many, many millions of Americans, I get it. I get it. I mean, the Democrats were insane on, on those issues. I mean, to call any concern about the border racism, right? I mean, that's, I mean, that was a, a suicidal politics. I mean, it was just the dumbest thing imaginable until you get to the, the, the trans thing, which was even dumb. So, I mean, you know, the fact that that Kamala Harris couldn't speak even to intelligible sentences, accounting for her change of heart around taxpayer fund to gender reassignment surgery for incarcerated illegal immigrants. I mean, that's, I mean, that's largely why she didn't, didn't win. I mean, the, the, the, the, the, the most effective political ad of, of, I mean, if not our lifetime, you know, several decades was, you know, she's for they, them, he's for you, right? I mean, they, I think I put 30% of the ads spent onto that, onto that, but it would have been so easy for a sane and morally sane candidate to have said something rational. It went asked about that, that policy. But because of the, the constraints of wokeism, which I, you know, I haven't dissipated as much as I would have hoped at this point. I mean, we can, we can talk about whether we're, we're going to get a resurgence of moral confusion from the Democrats and now in the, you know, on the, on the heels of their victory, you know, their, their sweep of the elections. But I don't know what lesson I can draw there. But I fear that the ideologues on the left could capture more of the conversation because many Democrats are going to draw the lesson that they don't actually have to moderate that really what, the, the, the, the center of moral gravity here is more progressivism, more activism, more, you know, we woke two point, I mean, woke, AOC said woke 1.0 was crazy, but, you know, what is woke 2.0 in her mind or in the minds of anyone else whose, whose position is steered the Democratic Party. I don't know. I'm, I'm worried about it. Long before 1776, before Washington and Jefferson, there was another generation, men and women who crossed the notion to build a new kind of civilization. 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Go to Hillsdale.edu/trigger to enroll for free. That's Hillsdale.edu/trigger and see how America's story really began. The worrying thing for me is that we talk about policies and obviously the Democrats were insane. I think we can all agree with that. To me, that wasn't even the most dangerous thing. They were so antagonistic. They felt that they were just driving a wedge between about 11% of this country and the other 89%. You look at America and you go, "Well, it already feels incredibly divided. Can we really take woke 2.0 or is everything just going to implode as a result?" Yeah. I mean, let's table woke 2.0 for a second because I think that's a big conversation. But the defense of Democrats, it's amazing to see how little traction, criticism of Trump ever got even when he was visibly breaking our democracy. Again, based on pure selfishness. We had to remind you, we had a president who, a sitting president who was trying to steal an election, all the while saying it was stolen from him. He was engaged in creating this fraud, an enormous lie, running the risk of shattering our society with a conspiracy theory and producing political violence, and then he produced political violence. And did precious little to stop it for hours, as literally like the Congress people were being hunted in the Capitol. And then that whole thing got spun as, as what a false flag operation by the FBI. I mean, like, you know, you had Tucker Carlson, you know, and the other, you know, meme lords trying to spin this thing as having nothing to do with anything that there were no stakes, right? These are all just people's larping or they got that they got let in by the cops. You know, it was, nothing was ever at stake. It certainly wasn't a riot. I mean, this was like just a, just a desecration of our democracy. And it was a quite a consequential one. And there were moments where that really could have become a proper emergency. I mean, like, you know, had Mike Pence caved in and done what Trump was urging him to do. Really, I mean, again, the guy's life was almost certainly in jeopardy because of how the president was behaving at that moment. Had he caved in, you know, who knows what would have happened, right? So it's, it's, it's, this is a man who was willing to play a game of chicken with, with American history. And again, purely, it's not that there's no some high, it's not a higher motive here. It's not like we were in war with a war with a superpower. And he had to claim, you know, wartime powers because otherwise everything was going to be ruined. Oh, this is a guy who just wants to be rich and famous and, and, and extract the next ruble from the next deal that he, I mean, it's just, I mean, does anyone think that, if Maduro had been smart enough to buy a billion dollars worth of Trump's mean coin that we've gone and defend his way, I mean, it's like that, that's the world. The fact that that's even plausible. The one I stated that way, that's the measure of how much damage has been done to the brand of America. And also Venezuela. Well, I mean, I've been, I mean, Venezuela, but I mean, take it, take it out of Venezuela. If, if the mullahs in Tehran had offered Trump and, and would cough a, a multi billion, billion dollar resort deal on the Persian Gulf, what would be our, Iran policy? I don't think anyone knows, right? I mean, that, that's the thing. But you could not have said that of any other American president in our lifetime. And that, that, and so Trump has created that world where we have a country that stands for nothing apart from, you know, you can have whatever advantage that president can get personally, right? I mean, like, we have a, we have a, a country that, the, the Dublin, will not judge the moral integrity of any other nation now. I mean, he, he, he vilifies our allies and tariffs them to, into oblivion or threatens to. And he strangely lionizes our genuine enemies, like Putin, right? And, and so it's, I mean, it's been, I mean, there, there, there really needs to be a reckoning. We need a, some kind of hard reset of, of, of America's role in the world, ultimately in, in 2028, hopefully with the same administration. But, I mean, we're not, it was certainly not out of the woods. He's got two more years of his, his tenure here. So like, who knows what's going to happen in his lame duck phase? And he's not, obviously, not going to admit to himself or anyone else that he's a lame duck. So, and he still has a tremendous amount of power as president. I mean, he's going to be investigated and maybe impeached. I mean, it'll be, it'll be, it'll be certainly more friction based on the results of these elections. But, um, he can create a tremendous amount of harm. And I do worry now that the, the reckoning, that the cleaning of, of house that needs to happen here is going to be perceived by most people right of center as just more cynical law fair. Right? Like this is just, you know, like the, an investigation of his cronies and like, let me take the corruption piece, which everyone really should be nauseated by. I mean, this is not investigating him for the Stormy Daniels payment. I mean, there, there is so much there to investigate and to prosecute. I mean, and, and if we do, if, if, if by magic, he and his fellow enablers haven't broken laws, well, then obviously we don't have the right laws, right? I mean, so we'd be, you know, so the DeSantis is, I mean, there are many people making the same noises. We, you should not be able to trade stocks in these roles, right? I mean, this is just, it's insane that we had Trump, I mean, Trump has been placing more stock trades, and I think, you know, like all U.S. presidents combined in American history. I mean, it's just like, it's insane that what has happened in advance of each iteration of his tarot policy, for instance. I mean, the people who are tracking, you know, what, what people are doing on the stock market. Well, Sam, this is where I hear my inner voice of the, of the reasonable right here, and I was going to make the joke. He's almost made as much money as stock market as Nancy Pelosi. No, but if you cared about Pelosi, this is, this is 100x Pelosi. I know, but I guess what I'm saying is, and we actually have this conversation with David Pacman early in the trip as well, is it, this is all feeling a bit Russian to me, because in Russia, everyone's guilty, everyone at the top of politics commits crime and bribery and all, because that's the only way you can, that's how they all operate. Right. And then the people who it is convenient in that moment are politically persecuted, they are the ones that get persecuted, and now you've got to the point where everyone's preemptively partying in themselves and their children and their associates or whatever. So I, everything you're saying makes perfect sense, but I think if you were to apply that same magnifying glass to much of the left, you'd also get very similar things. But it's the scale that is just, I mean, there, everything Trump has done. I mean, there are, I mean, this goes sound hyperbolic, but I would bet anything there are 100 things Trump has done. Right. I mean, if not a thousand, but let's just, I mean, I'll be conservative here. A hundred things he's done that are just totally unprecedented in their level of corruption, and I mean, I treasonously corrupt, I mean, just it's unbelievable that we have a person in the, in the, in the Oval Office, who is behaving this way. Can you give some examples, just go like one, two, do you see what I mean? I mean, so it's specifically with the, with, on the topic of corruption, again, everything, I mean, you have to ask, ask yourself, what, what, what was the tariff policy for? Well, it's revealed when, you know, he puts a 46% tariff on Vietnam, and their response is to green light a resort deal for the Trump family, and then the tariff comes off. Right, like, I mean, that, that's, so is there a law against that? Apparently not. I mean, it remains to be seen. I mean, I don't, I don't actually know, but it's like, it's, it's very hard to create a system of governance that is immune to the predations of a motivated psychopath who you just put into the role of, into the most powerful role in that system. Right. So it may be impossible. I mean, I, I think James Madison said it wasn't possible to have to create a government that is so, you know, perfectly tuned that it's going to work like clockwork, even when you have someone of, of the lowest conceivable character in the driver's seat. Right. But that's what we have. We have someone of the lowest conceivable character in the driver's seat, and that's been obvious for a decade. Right. This is not, there's nothing, nothingness has been hidden. Or so anyone who is surprised to, on any level, to discover who Trump is now, has been completely asleep. I mean, this is, this is just, there's, and I'm not even sure they, they, again, I don't, I, I really have no theory of mind for anyone who is only now starting to feel that maybe Trump was, well, I gave you the, hold on, but I gave it to you and this is where we have, they just don't like that he, he didn't care about groceries or their groceries when he was waiting more in Iraq. I think that the fair steel man version is certainly for the people who were prepared to go either way, which are in the minority in this country admittedly, but, but they're the key piece, right. They're the thing that most elections are, give me, you, I think it's fair to say, is what I said earlier, which is, you have a binary choice. Yeah. And you can have, you know, trans. No, no, I'm not, I'm not talking about those people. So I, I get the people who would say, okay, and this is like, and, I mean, Ben Shapiro, when I debated Ben Shapiro on my podcast, he essentially articulated this position in response to which I don't have all that much to say in the end. And he said, listen, this, we're talking about the real world here. I had a choice between Kamala Harris and, and Donald Trump. I don't have to like the character of the president or admire it or be at all confused about it to, to feel that, Given what I would, what I can reasonably expect her, I'm just putting words in his mouth, that's not what he said, but this is the subtext, given what, you know, I had every reason to believe Kamala Harris's positions would be, especially with regard to Israel. This is a forced choice and I took, I took the, you know, the person who, um, warts and all was going to have a better policy with respect to the things I most care about. And for many people, it was a very short list and for many people, there was only one thing on that list, right? In Ben's case, I think policy with respect to Israel was, I mean, it's not the only thing, but it had to be very high for him. And I get it. I mean, the kinds of noises that you heard from the Democratic Party, post October 7th, I mean, Biden was good for about two months, maybe. But then there was a kind of a great unraveling of moral clarity. And now we have among Democrats, seemingly a litmus test, you know, a kind of loyalty test that you have to use this word genocide in a way that no one used it up until a few years ago or no sane person used it this way up until a few years ago. And describe, you know, what Israel did in Gaza as a genocide. And, you know, I think we're, um, I mean, seeing that, if you're a single issue voter, I get it. So, you know, the people I'm deeply confused by are the people who have always been part of the MAGA cult, right, I may love the MAGA, like he is kind of a religious figure. So, if any of those people are being picked off now by what the price of eggs, right? I don't know how, like, I don't have a theory of mind for them. I don't know what it would, it was never clear to me what it would take because it was always so obvious that this is a man you couldn't admire. Well, look, let's, let's steal man that. So, there's a lot of people who voted for Trump, who probably also would have voted for someone like Bernie because those were the forgotten majority. They were the people who had never, their concerns had never been addressed. But it was always obvious that he wasn't kind of addressed there. But Sam, if nobody ever addresses your concerns, if nobody ever cares what your problems, if people always ignore you, if people in areas, let's be fair like this, think you're just one layer above scum and all of a sudden someone comes along and says that he does care, even if he doesn't, that's still better than any politician who just pretty much ignores you and talks to you with contempt. Okay. But this guy was always, again, everything's in plain view. This is a guy who's selling meme coins and gold watches and golden sneakers and other crap to his fans and in the case of meme coins, doing an actual rug poll where he makes billions and they lose billions, right? I mean, people have lost billions on his crappy meme coins. I agree, Sam, that that's indefensible. But to me, correct me if I'm wrong, the meme coin came after the election, wasn't it? It's okay. He came before it, but right before inauguration. But there's a broader thing going on, which is, but he was always that guy. I mean, that's the thing. He always had contempt for his fans. He's the guy who said, I could shoot someone in Times Square and not lose a single vote, right? He's saying, my fans have, don't care if I commit murder, right? My fans are psychopaths, I mean, that's the subtext, like they have no moral standard. There is no, there's, I do not have to worry about the maintenance of my reputation with these people because they're fucking barbarians. I mean, that's the subtext I always heard and it was loud. They should have heard it too. This wasn't insult to his fans and they didn't hear it for some reason. They just kept fucking laughing. And so, and again, I'm not convinced that I do think we have a radical core of the mega cult. I don't know what percentage of American society this is, but maybe it's 25% that cannot be disillusioned on this point. I think he is, his approval rating can sink to more or less where it has, I mean, I don't know, it's like around 30% now, but I think there is a floor here beneath which you have people who just, again, I mean, I'm very familiar with, with cults, I mean, it's amazing how resistant to falsifiability, you know, a cultic attachment is, right? I mean, literally you can have someone who predicts the flying saucer is going to land on Thursday night at 8 o'clock and beam us up and then everyone's waiting on the back lawn on Thursday and nothing happens. And half the people leave because they realize they're in the presence of stark delusion. But the other half just doubled down. They have a rationale for why it didn't work. And now a lot of people have a rationale that, you know, our man was just misled by the evil Jews. Right? And BB got into his head, led him into a war of choice that, I mean, it's easy to overlook the fact that they're strangely denigrating Trump in this, like, like, Trump was misled by BB really. That's your guy that he just couldn't, he couldn't figure out what was what and BB outsmarted him. But they're the conspiracy thinking that he has leveraged in our society. And this is one of the most irresponsible things he's done. He's just, his political tenure started with a conspiracy, the birth of a conspiracy against Obama. And he has just danced from one conspiracy to the next. I mean, the Epstein story was the only thing, interestingly, that threatened to ruin his reputation among his fans. But yeah, there'll be some conspiracy that will, will absorb this disgrace for him. And it will, it will place the blame elsewhere for, I don't know how many millions of Americans, but it's got to be tens of millions. I think it's interesting what you say. I was going to move on, but I think the BB tricked Trump into attacking Ron. I mean, it's a complicated one because I do think Israel sees it as it being in its own interest for the United States to help in destroying Iran's offensive weapons system. Even if they don't have nuclear weapons. But it seems to me like, actually, that is a mechanism to protect Trump from criticism in people's minds because they can say, well, it's not Trump. He got tricked. He Israel did this, which I always thought was a very strange argument. I mean, first of all, literally every country in the world is trying to shape American foreign policy in its direction because America is the most powerful country in the world. Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Qatar, every Qatar, China, every country in the world is attempting to persuade the President of the United States and other people in the US to do something. But ultimately, it is up to the people in charge of the United States to make those decisions and if they make a bad decision, which I personally think they run more wars, that's on them. Well, it is. And also, people are forgetting that on any given day, Trump will tell B.B. just not do something and B.B. will comply. Right. I mean, literally call your planes back. It's just that's just not what's been happening. It's delusional. I mean, there's so much delusion required to have supported this guy. Again, I'm not discounting the fact that the force choice, if you had a very short list of concerns and you were very worried about the wokeness destroying everything you care about, I get how it was possible to be radicalized there. But to ever thought this man was competent or knowledgeable or had the moral integrity to be President was obviously a delusion from the beginning. I mean, that's just. 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It entirely, extremely dangerous, was being practiced, not just the level of the presidency, but throughout every major institution in America, fair? So, yeah, yeah, I mean, you and I might draw the line slightly in slightly different places, but. Transliminal women say that. I mean, so, I'm sorry, I'm in the fence about that. Just to be clear, like, I wouldn't necessarily want to sign up to, I mean, there are many people who have gone hard against wokeness in general, or, you know, the trans thing in particular, and have said things that I can't defend. Like, so, like, I'm not, you know, in whoever, you know, Matt Walsh's lane on this, right? Whatever. But, yes, there was clearly a. There's, the activist class among Democrats had, far, we're talking, you know, 8% of Democrats, maybe, had far too much power, and have. I don't know what, when the rubble, when the smoke clears, and we can investigate the rubble, I will know what. You know, it's currently true. I really don't know what's currently true. But, for years, this hysteria has just vitiated our elite institutions. Universities, newspapers, scientific journals, I mean, it's just been appalling. I mean, you literally have the best journals on earth, you know, both medical and in a general scientific. Publishing editorials, disavowing the use of the word woman, right? So, again, I don't know everything she said on social media. I'm a fan of JK Rowland, and I would defend her against most of her attackers, but I'm sure she has been pushed to the brink and said something on Twitter that I haven't read, and then probably wouldn't defend. But still, like, her fundamental allergy to this particular, on this particular front in the War of Ideas, I mean, just this attack on the use of the word woman, and where we were condemned until the end of the world to talk about men's straighters and people with ovaries. I mean, that was so idiotic and so offensive. Yeah, I mean, it's just the fact that it captured our elite institutions is deeply embarrassing, and eventually people who are part of this lunacy will forget their contributions to it. And everyone's going to look back and say, "Can you believe that?" I mean, what, you know. That seems incredibly optimistic to me, Sam. This is where I was going with all of this. You think we're going to be fighting over the word use of the word woman? Well, first of all, I think it's important to broaden this out, and to recognize some things that sometimes people forget about when they talk about workness. Workness was not just about trans women or women, JK Rowland, and Nazi and whatever. I see a direct connection between workness and open borders. There's a direct connection between what you rightly see, I think, is hysteria and stupidity and, you know, whatever else you want to label it as, when it comes to Israel. Because Israel is the oppressor, Palestinians are oppressed. This whole thing. So it's not just about it was embarrassing. It was outright dangerous to the survival and flourishing of our societies, in my opinion. Now, we are now in the position, after the midterms, where nobody really knows exactly how it's going to go. But there's a very real possibility that, in the same way, that you would say, well, all these people voted for Trump because they hated workness and they were blind to this. Well, a lot of people voted against the Republicans now because of high energy prices and so on. And there's a very real possibility now that you're going to get a workness like you haven't seen before. Don't you think? The fact you're listening to an inter-discussion like this one tells us you're exactly the kind of listener who'd enjoy a show built it entirely around that level of detail. It's hosted by Dr. Noam Weisman and educated to spend his entire career studying and teaching Israeli history. What makes a work is that Weisman isn't trying to tell you what to think. He digs into where the narratives actually differ and he brings on guests who don't all agree with each other or with him. From journalists have it rhetoric good to Palestinian activist Ahmed Ferd Al-Kateeb. It doesn't rush the story to get to a neat conclusion and that's rare than it should be. Search Unpacking Israeli History on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Podcast or click the link in the description to start listening. I mean, I think that's. So it's just to link that to my deepest concern here. I mean, so the path. In my view, the path to fascism in America is for the left to get sufficiently crazy that only the right will do. I mean, if the DSA captures the Democratic Party to a significant degree, if in 2028 say, we have a Mamdani-like candidate who's. can be credibly TARD as a communist or a communist adjacent idiot on all things economic, leaving the wokeness aside. I think in a forced choice between fascism and communism, America picks fascism 100 times out of 100. So I just think that's the society we're living in. So if we put up a sufficiently radical and in the worst case, kind of a red-green alliance, useful idiot, or genuine ideologue, again, Islamoleptist marriage, DSA plus some entanglement with Islam, I think you could literally elect anyone, right or center. It could be my pillow guy. It could be Don Jr. It could be a genuinely scary right-wing ideologue. It could be Tucker Carlson. I mean, it could be anyone against that. Right? So if the left gets sufficiently crazy, that's the failure mode there is not that we get Islamoleptism in the White House, I think we get something truly appalling on the right, so that's what I'm worried about. But yeah, I share your concern that the lesson that the Democrats will draw here is that this guy's the limit. We really can do no wrong here. There is no left-leaning message, however, bizarre that we'll count against us effectively now, because we're part of this blue tsunami. Again, imagine an LSA like candidate for the presidency in 2028. I don't think that candidate stands a chance of winning in America, largely because of how anchored at least half of Americans are, and it's probably more like 60% or to some version of Christian religiosity, but they're clearly that doesn't get them. So then what is possible on the right in response? I really think you could get someone even less qualified than Trump and more ideological than Trump. I mean, Trump's defense, one of the sins he doesn't have is a commitment to a worldview. He doesn't have anything he's willing to stand behind beyond his own narrowly construed self-interest. No, I think you could get effectively President Nick Fuentes if you promote it. If it's a forced choice between LSA and Nick Fuentes, I think we go right in this country. And no matter how dangerous and explicitly unethical that right-wing message is. But it's also as well, and we have to be honest about this, we're talking about Trump and the voter has to take some responsibility, as do the politicians that are preceded those presidents. If you look at Trump, why was the main reason Trump got elected? No more forever wars. It's because people were burnt out from Afghanistan, Iraq, they were sick of the lies, they were sick of this idea that you could go over to another country, you could bring democracy, and all that happened is that you were there for two decades and you pumped in trillions, and then at the end, what were you left with? Yeah. So I think the lesson that people are drawing from that admittedly depressing history is isolationism. And I think that's a disaster. So American isolationism is synonymous with the ascendance of our enemies. You know, it's the ascendance of China. So we want more CCP influence globally. Is that really the goal here? Well, then be an America first isolationist. Do you want Russia to be even more ravencious than it is? And do you want NATO to properly dissolve? I mean, even now our allies or former allies can be forgiven for thinking that NATO has in effect dissolved. I mean, who thinks we're going to come to the rescue of Poland tomorrow if Russia invades Poland? So we need a liberal world order. First of all, America has been the primary beneficiary of a liberal world order for 80 years. That's just a fact. Trump is right to point out that there's been a free rider problem. The one of the good effects of Trump's craziness has been that Europe has woken up and realized its need to shoulder the expense of its own defense or take responsibility for its own defense, however belatedly. He was right to castigate, I think the Germans, it was for, you know, just their happy dependence on Russian oil, right? So so, but the idea that America shouldn't have a leadership role in the world and that we don't have a vested interest in global order that is that is not just this, you know, a return to, you know, spheres of influence and just pure power politics. It has been a mutually beneficial arrangement for us to shoulder a disproportionate burden of being the world's top, right? We have not merely been stolen from it. Sam, be fair, most people in this country wouldn't see it that way, most people look at it right, look at it, look at it, look at Afghanistan. It's very easy to criticize those wars and so there are many things to say about those wars. Vietnam, for example, is another one, most people would point out as well. Yes, but it's easy to forget that, you know, we had a, the actual superpower conflict with the Soviet Union was a problem for the whole world, and it was not obvious how to solve it, right? And the idea that you're just going to have countries falling to Soviet, I mean, you can speak to this better than I can, the idea that we would want to resist that and resisted militarily in the end, that was not, that was not crazy. Now, I mean, the war in Afghanistan was totally justifiable that we launched it in an effort to get Al-Qaeda. Then we prosecuted it badly and we stayed there for too long and we were, and it is completely understandable to draw the lesson that nation building is a project to which we are not well-suited. But again, it's hard to, it's easy to forget with the benefit of hindsight now how tempting it was to see that it was possible drawing the lesson for, let me take the aftermath of World War II. I mean, it is amazing to consider that we bombed Germany and Japan nearly to oblivion and then help rebuild both of those societies and they became allies in a few short years. I mean, how, I mean, it's like a, it's a double miracle, right? So you have that experience. I mean, Japanese nationalism, you know, with, you know, kamikaze is an all. I mean, it's not jihadism, but it's, it was damn close, right? I mean, it was, it was just as, you know, psychotically committed to a cause as you can get without, you know, a proper notion of, of martyrdom and, you know, paradise awaiting you with 72 versions, right? The fact that we dropped two nuclear bombs on that society, in addition to all of, you know, the fire bombings of, of cities, and in, I think, it was seven years by the, like, like, 1952 we left and they were allies. I mean, so it's easy to have drawn the lesson that nation building is in principle possible. And what we didn't understand was how difficult, how much culture matters, how much religion in particular, in my view, matters. And, yeah, I mean, we diluted ourselves into thinking that people were, you know, if enough people just died their finger and, and, and vote voted in an election in Iraq and in Afghanistan, you know, these would be healthy democracies, right? And the, and the other problem is, is that the examples that you were quoting, as incredible as they are, and as wonderful as those societies turned out to be, say to years ago, people are going, you know, it's like a football team, going, well, these tactics work and you go, yeah, mate, they worked in 1945, it's 2026, it's, the tactics, that's what, a lot of people would say the tactics don't work anymore. Look at the deficit, 40 trillion. And as well, Sam, you know, there's a lot of people in this country, if you look at it right the way through history, have always been isolationist. You know, you didn't want to get involved, not you personally, the Americans didn't want to get involved in World War One, you didn't want to get involved in World War Two, and there were understandable reasons for that, in both instances, by the way. This has always been the, a large part of America's position, which is, we've got our own problems here, it's a long way away. We need to prioritize America. Right, but seriously, but again, there's, there's so much confusion about what is real here. I mean, if you ask most Americans about foreign aid, for instance, and you say, I mean, they're, I might get these numbers a little wrong, but I mean, this is the gist of what polls have shown for quite some time. If you ask, well, do we spend too much on foreign aid or vast numbers of Americans? Yeah, we spend way too much on foreign aid. How much should we spend? And they'll give a number that's like 10x, what we actually spent. Right, I mean, so it's, there, this is not a coherent world view when you actually drill down on it. I mean, there, there, it's just a fact that we have problems that are global that can only be solved globally. I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about AI at some point. AI is one of those problems. I mean, we need to solve this, this coordination problem that we can't even address at the moment, but we, I mean, we are in a arms race, and we have to get out of an arms race, and we have to figure out how to build this technology in a way that one isn't going to destroy us, and two could benefit us in an uncountable number of ways that that, I mean, in success, there's an unimaginable amount of wealth that could be spread around everyone, right? But we, but we have a political problem to solve first. I mean, the problem is so bad that if God came down and handed us the perfectly aligned AI, right? The AI that's never going to go rogue, that's never on its own, going to go terminator on us. It's just this, this oracle and, you know, perpetual motion machine of wealth creation. Even that, just again, just handed to us, could fatally destabilize our world, given how driven we are by politics, right? So we have to figure out how to cooperate at a global scale in order to solve global problems, and here you have a philosophy that, I mean, Trump doesn't even hold. I mean, again, he holds no philosophy, but this spirit of isolationism is antithetical to that, and Trump himself as an incompetent and a grifter and a maniac is antithetical to that. The cult, the cult of no-nothings around him, you know, just that has been, you know, everyone around him has passed through this sieve of loyalty tests. I mean, these are just people who are just willing to eat shit for him and lie perpetually for him as a loyalty test. I mean, that's who he, that's who has survived contact with this man. Strangely, some of the wealthiest and most successful people in our society have passed this test. I mean, the R.O. and oligarchs have been willing to conform to these calls that parameters. So, again, it's not a recipe for sane collaboration with allies, and allies who can then apply enough pressure to the Putin's of the world and to the CCP's of the world, so as to get something coercive actually done. I mean, so one of the most despicable things he's done and consequential things he's done is so fully alienate our allies, and this is to go back to the war in Iran for a second. The reason why the war in Iran won recent, why it appears to be a terrible failure, is that we went into it with no allies. No one was on board. He alienated all of our allies. He tariffed them and insulted them and lied about them and then went into a war, and then he said, "We don't need you people because we've got all the power." And then once the straight of Hormuz became a problem, then he asked for help. And again, no one keeps score. I mean, no one sees the bluff, the bluff gets called, the humiliation, the new bluff, the lie to cover the old bluff. I mean, it's just, it is one, it's just a cascade of embarrassment. Again, and his superpower is that he's incapable of shame, right? So he literally, he, he, he, he doesn't notice that he's just lost face in a way that would cause most people who want to kill themselves, right? But Sam, this is when people would say, "Look, the policeman of the world doesn't work. You could've worn it wrong." And there were no people. But that's what our alliances are for. I mean, so, so it's like, we are the, we're the most powerful, we're the center of the alliance. But we need allies, clearly we need allies. And, and so, and yes, it was, and NATO wasn't perfect, but NATO was better than no NATO. I mean, so it is, you just have to have to, I mean, filter by this question, how much has Putin has Putin benefited in his own mind, whatever is in fact real? How much, how much of the time that Putin has spent watching Trump's career has he been gratified by what has been happening and how much of the time has he spent feeling destabilized by it or, or feeling that it was obviously to his disadvantage? I mean, there's been a few sanctions there and a few, but, but generally speaking, I think he has watched a colossal act of vandalism be perpetrated on his enemy, America, by America. I mean, we have vandalized our own house. And I think it's, I'm sure it's been immensely gratifying to him and also for the CCP. Again, there's nothing, it's not that there aren't, you know, marginalia there where, you know, Trump has been hard on China in, in, in moments, but, and even on Russia in moments. But generally speaking, we have, he has presided over a radical diminishment in American power and influence. And that's largely been a story of having alienated all of our allies. Sam, you mentioned AI. I, there's a lot I could challenge there, but I, challenge, challenge, challenge the worst thing. I mean, what am I actually wrong about? Where you're wrong, I think, well, there's two pieces to this and I, I, I, one of the things has happened with the run war is, Francis and I think it's pretty much the most important issue over the last year. And we've talked about it so much that even our audience who really care about geopolitics are not that interested in it. But I do think this, from our perspective, it's worth exploring this with you because you're a smart game. We've always respected your opinion on these things. However, our attitude to this latest bit of their run war, if you frame it like that, 12-day war, you know, you, you take a shot at their nuclear facilities, seems perfectly sensible, even though military analysts we've spoken to since would argue it was never particularly likely to succeed. But let's say even there was a 5% chance of succeeding. To me, it's an ombre, and we do not want Iran to have nuclear weapons. The issue with this conflict is, and this was explained to us, when we came to the US last time, it was right as the war just was breaking. And our attitude was, we don't know, we're here to find out, initially kind of skeptical that this is likely to lead to good things, but let's find out. The coin is in the air, I think, was the phrase we used. I used. And then we talked to lots of people, both on camera and off camera, and it became, a number of things became clear. Number one, there was no great strategy here. This was a sugar high from Venezuela, I'm on a roll here, we'll do this. Much like with Putin's invasion of Ukraine, there was a lack of accurate information, for the reason I think that you articulated, which is if you optimize for loyalty, you don't get people who are going to tell you the truth about certain things. But ultimately, Robert Pape explained this to us very well. Robert Pape is, I mean, he's. Don't get me started on Robert Pape, but he is a misinformation artist on this topic. Okay, well, let me present the argument, and then you can explain where it's wrong, because I've found this before with the Iran Wars, when you mention certain names, people start to get upset, or whatever, but actually they don't have the counter-argument, now maybe you do. Let's hear it. Absolutely. Right. But the argument was that because of the nature of Iran itself, because of how big it is, because of the geography of it, because it has the control over the show, from us, this was always. And literally, the problem with what you've just said about Robert Pape is, literally everything he told us in April, March or April, was about. It was April. April. Has turned out to be true pretty much to the letter. Well, what's turned out to be true, just the fact that the war has not been won? No. He explained how exactly it would go, and what the mechanism of a leverage Trump had and what the mechanism of leverage Iran had, and what Iran would do at every phase. And so he basically said, they will close this trip from us, and at this point. But everyone knew that. I mean, I can only assume Trump and Hegs, I mean, as stupid as some of these people are, they had to have been briefed about all, I mean, everyone, I mean, for years and years we knew that. Fine. Well, let's play your game then. If then, despite, as you say, the stupidity they knew all of this, what was their plan for when they did that? Well, they clearly had none, right? Right. Right. So the. And PAPES argument is, there is no plan because they have the leverage, so unless you're prepared to escalate further, there's nothing you can do. What does escalate further mean? It means you start to land Marines on Carg Island, you start to land Marines in Iran proper, at which point they escalate further? Well, I don't know, so again, Robert Papers, I don't think he claims to be a military strategist and that's probably a good thing. I think he does, actually. I think that's what he studies. Well, he studies. Well, he studies, I mean, so his. So just to give a little history here. So he's very famous for having written a book, it's a little confusing because it goes by, I think it was published under two titles, but certainly one of these titles was dying to win. It's about suicide, Sarah. To suicide, Sarah. Let's not get into it, because it's going to just derail a conversation, it's a bit much for people. Just come back to the run thing. They'll argue, forget about Robert Papers, forget about all of this. The argument was, the problem with this war is not that it was badly prosecuted, the problem with this war. No, no, it's. Is it. Is it unwindable? It's unwindable with allies? It's unwindable. It's unwindable with a free world that's willing to take some pain at the pump in order to starve this regime that's to emisorate and its own people. There is no doubt that if we wanted to do to run what we did to Germany and Japan, theoretically we could. What if. What if it's just. I mean, since the problem is, so. What is it? Well, here's the deeper issue is that we, and I don't just mean America, I mean, the free world, we are in a war against jihadism, and we've been in a war against jihadism for as long as I've been alive, right? So. And this is an unacknowledged war, right? People don't understand this war. They really understand it in Israel because it is right. It's been on their doorstep since the moment of their founding, even before. It's unignorable there, but here it's ignorable, right? Here we get a 9/11, we get. You know, if the. It's ignorable even in France, you know, they get. You know, they get a Bataclan massacre and a Charlie Hebdo massacre, and you get. You get a. You know, a school teacher who has just decapitated in the middle of the street, and. And. There's a certain level of this that they're just willing to tolerate, but we have a global problem with jihadism. And the most excruciating instance of this problem is a. It would be a nuclear-armed regime that is jihadist. And that is what Iran could become. Iran has been governed since '79 by jihadists, right? So this is a. These are. These people are really willing to die. They're really willing to see everyone beneath them die. You know, these are quite stoical in the context of their certainty about paradise. I mean, you just have to look at how they fought their side of the war against Iraq, right? They sent tens of thousands of boys to clear minefields with their lives, right? Israel had nothing to do with this. There were no Jews involved, America was not part of this. This was Muslim fighting Muslim, right? And they were sending boys across minefields with plastic keys around their necks that were going to open the gates of paradise for them. And some of these boys survived, they got to the Iraqi side. The Iraqis were literally stories of Iraqis just reduced to tears and being unwilling to fire their rifles at waves of boys, right? This is a fucking zombie movie, right? And some of these boys survived and were put in detention on the Iraqi side and interviewed. I mean, like all of this, these kids were talked to. I agree with the word, so this is a worldview that we have to come to terms with. It makes the unthinkable, not only thinkable, but guaranteed, and it's not nationalism and it's not ordinary politics, the way Robert Payton would tell you it is, right? This is not the prosecution of nationalistic goals, you know, in ordinary dress real grievances. This is true belief in paradise, right? So if we have a jihadist regime armed with nuclear weapons, everything we think we know about nuclear deterrence goes out the window, right? Let's accept this for the sake of argument, because this is what I see now. If I say anything about how this war was a bad idea, I get a bunch of people saying, "So you think Iran should have nuclear weapons?" No, I don't think Iran should have. Well, the question is, what should we do about Iran? Well, the question is, how does prosecuting this war achieve a non-Nuclear Iran? As far as I can tell, Iran is way closer to having nuclear as a result of this. Well, that may be the case, but again, that's a measure of how ineptally we have done this. Let's say that you've got, I mean, you're probably overestimating the strength of your allies. We know what the British armed forces look like at this point, same with the French. It's not so much a matter of sending in their troops. It's a matter of having agreed about, you know, what the mission is. And what do you understand to be the direct strategy that wasn't positioned? What would the world look like if the problem had been sufficiently articulated by a president who actually understood it and could speak, honestly, about it? And our allies were on board. And so therefore, we are willing to watch gas prices climb for a year or two and do what we need to do to mitigate that and have our allies in the Gulf help. I mean, so the amazing thing is we had allies, you know, oil producing allies who wanted us to win this war against Iran almost as much as Israel did, right? But their oil went largely through the Shreve from us, which Iran then blew up. Right. So they have the trump card. How do you overcome that? Well, you overcome it by one understanding that this really is, this does not get better. It's never going to get easier to prevent Iran from getting nukes. It's certainly not going to be easier once they have nukes. So we know what happens, let's just reverse engineer it, we know what happens when they get nukes, right, short of them using nukes and, and, you know, attempt to actually achieve in a genocide, which, which, you know, they are committed, forget about that. Just let's just, on the day they have nukes, what can we do to walk that back? Nothing. Basically nothing. But there's nothing we can do now. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we, you're pointing to a war that we have barely fought and without allies, other than Israel, without any, without any of the preparation you would have thought we would have, so, so, I mean, the fact that we don't have enough of our own ordinance, like the fact that we could, we could, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we shoot our wad, over the course of a very short war, and then we're, we, we're hearing that we actually don't have enough interceptors for, like, we, we, we, we, we now have a prop, we, now, now China is, is, I'm Taiwan, and we realize we might, we, even if we wanted to, maybe we can't help Taiwan, because we, we certainly don't have, you know, the spares to, to give to, or to sell to Ukraine, because we didn't build enough, and it takes us, you know, four years to build something that we should be able to build in a month, right? And we don't have the drone game that we should have, and we, we haven't been, we haven't, we haven't been supporting Ukraine enough in that war to, to have learned everything they've learned in their war against, I mean, we, we, we should be the absolute forefront of how to wage war in the 21st century, and we're clearly not, right? So there's, there's the layers of mistakes here, and layers of lack of preparation. So, I mean, I think we, we're all right to be genuinely surprised and horrified by the ways in which we were not prepared for Iran's first moves that were all too predictable in this war. Like so, yeah, they're going to bomb our closest military bases, you know, send drones into our closest military bases and bomb our allies and their, you know, oil refineries, and we were surprised by that. I mean, that was, we didn't have a, that wasn't part of our contingency, contingency plan, we didn't have enough of our own drone defenses or enough interceptors to deal with that. That, that, okay, that's the fact that our actual military power, as it is needed, as it's needed now, the way war is fought now is so apparently ramshackle, right? That's not a, that's not a, that's not a sign that it's impossible to wage this war and, and, and, and win against the power like Iran. I mean, if, if, if Iran is impossible for us to beat in a war, what is China? The fact you're listening to an in depth discussion like this one, tell us you're exactly the kind of listener who'd enjoy a show built it entirely around that level of detail. It's hosted by Dr. Noan Weisman and educated to spend his entire career studying and teaching Israeli history. Each episode walks through the people events and decisions that shaped modern Israel from the earliest roots of Zionism through to today. He digs into where the narratives actually differ and he brings on guests who don't all agree with each other or with him, from journalists who live retic good to Palestinian activist Ahmed Foud al-Qaedaib. Search Unpacking Israeli History on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Podcasts or click the link in the description to start listening. See this is where I think the distinction is important and this is why I brought up Germany and Japan. If you take the thesis that Iran is about to develop nuclear weapons and the first act that it will take with them is to drop them on a neighbor, let's say in Saudi Arabia or Israel or whatever, and the world must act to stop this, then absolutely the United States with allies or without can win that war. But what that requires is a level of investment, I use investment in inverted commas that is orders of magnitude greater than what's been committed. Or a willingness to starve their economy and pay some paying ourselves in the meantime. The thing is, I mean, so if so we blockade this rate of hormones, it doesn't get blockaded for us, we blockade it, right? We destroy their refineries, right? Then they will destroy their Arab refineries. Okay, but there's, and there are these things that take years to get online once it's safe, and it won't be safe for many years. But I mean, again, we have, I mean, this vulnerability, so it's hard to, I mean, where do you set your way back machine for some sane policy here to have prepared us to fight this war that was always going to be inevitable? Like, I mean, this is not, it was always obvious that Iran couldn't get news, right? And if you, and so it's, so one way to have been confused about this, and many Democrats, I would say most Democrats are still confused about this, is to have thought that the negotiation track, you know, that Obama was on and, you know, Biden, Biden, I assume, thought he was, he was perpetuating that that was going to bear fruit, right? That you would, you could have an Iranian regime, again, a jihadist regime that is going to honestly sign a deal and not proceed to make nuclear weapons covertly or not. themself to the point where they could sprint whenever they decided they had to sprint for the bomb. That was always delusional from my point of view. I take the Israeli view of that, which is, okay, these people were never going to be rational actors who could be incentivized in normal ways and deterred in normal ways. That's just not the game they're playing. All right. This has taken a long time. I don't want to dwell on it too much. But to summarize, what I think is your position is Iran with nuclear weapons is such a. You're dinging me for all, or my view of this, for all of Trump's incompetence. I'm admitting all of the incompetence. No, this is not about Trump's incompetence. What I'm saying is, as I understand your argument is, the way to have dealt with this threat, which is a really serious, important threat, Iran can't have nuclear weapons, was to effectively say Iran with nukes is the greatest threat to global security and existence, and we the United States and our allies must act accordingly. And therefore. There's one crucial piece that we haven't mentioned here, which is that Iran almost uniquely has a population that. It's hard to know the exact percentages here, but it certainly seems a majority of which is ready for a secular democracy. It's ready to rid themselves of the jihadis who control it. And that's not something you could have said about many other states where nation-building was doing. But ultimately, what you're talking about is a level of investment of resources, a willingness to absorb pain, economic disruption, etc. That is orders of magnitude greater than what we've had. I don't know those orders of magnitude greater. Given the right preparation, I can give. I mean, we have the oil producing allies on our side in this. I mean, this is not going to war against all of the Muslim world and all of the petro states that we have the petro states that the main ones on our side here. Except the moment you escalate with Iran, they will destroy all the oil production facilities. Well, they're on the desalination plan. They don't actually know what is or was militarily feasible. Like, I don't actually know what. That's just hypothetical. I mean, if true, that synonymous with saying Iran has been, for who knows how many years, totally invulnerable given the stranglehold they have on their neighbors? They haven't been totally invulnerable because there's always a price to pay for attacking the neighbors. No, but they're willing to go to paradise. But before you get to paradise, there's the point of which you are still running a country. And so from that perspective, until you make this about their survival, they are acting in a way that is more like a rational actor than what you're talking about. And so the reason they haven't attacked their neighbors and whatever is. It's not in their interest to do so, until you make it in their interest to do so by attacking them the way the Trump has done, by destroying their oil facilities, by landing troops on their land, etc. And the paper argument, I know you're not a fan of his, but to me, very persuasive, is the more you escalate, the more they will counter escalate. And he explained exactly how they would do that. And that is exactly what they've done. And so the problem is that ultimately, it's not. I agree Iran shouldn't get nuclear weapons, but it's not clear to me that there's a route available for democratic nations. There is no success here, apart from regime change. The status quo is also intolerable. Like there's no. Again, this is like the vote between, you know, Kamala and. Yeah, we didn't let me finish. This was the important point that I was going to make, which is exactly. The joke has been made after the midterms. Iran has achieved regime change in America. And this was. It was Texas, yeah. And this was kind of my point, which is when you have a bunch of democratic countries, which have short election cycles, which are all massively in debt. Remember, this is important, right? If you're starting from a position, and France is alluded to this however many tens of minutes ago, where war after war after war, you'll promise that it will achieve some kind of outcome. It doesn't. It costs trillions of dollars. All of our countries are on massive levels of debt. Historically speaking, the pattern is you run up a surplus in peacetime and you spend that surplus in wartime. We're not in a position at the moment to make all of these investments, to tolerate the economic pain for years that you're talking about. And so the far more likely scenario is the Iranians who whatever their floors are not stupid, they know this, they know they don't have to hold out forever. Well, honestly, I mean, I don't know and I doubt you know and maybe no one knows how close that regime is to falling, right? And there's certainly good reason to believe that it's not far away, right? Certainly, again, remind yourself as to how we got into this. There was a possibility of what really looked like a decapitation strike. And the question is, do you fault the president for taking that opportunity? And you know, I can't fault him for that. It seems it seems. The title of the episode of your Sam Harris defense done. So I mean, that that was one of the more rational things he's done. Again, what's the counterfeit? The counterfactual is to just wait and see what Iran does in its own at the time of its choosing, you know, with a jihadist regime intact, right? All the counterfactual is, you accept the reality of the situation, which is unless you're prepared to launch a large scale or I would take full scale military conflict with people on the ground. My feeling is we learned the wrong lesson. We learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam and we had, you know, quote, "Vietnam syndrome" for many, many years that we just felt we couldn't do any, like we literally couldn't fire a gun because it's hopeless. We just don't have to fight anymore. So we just watch a genocide in Rwanda happen. We've got Navy SEALs parked on ships, you know, a mile away and we just watch 800,000 people get slaughtered with machetes over the course of 94 days as though we can't do anything about it, right? That's that was the paralysis we had as a country, you know, the jihadists put you to blow up, what is it, 271 Marines in their barracks? And we run away and watch, you know, hostages, Rod and in dungeons for a better part of a decade. And we do nothing because we are a paper tiger to ourselves, right? This is some, okay, the good guy, because there are good and bad actors in this world. There are good and bad worldviews, right? Now we're not, we have not always been the perfect good guys, but we're better than the jihadists. We were better than the Nazis. We're better than the CCP, right? At a certain point, the good guys have to be willing to defend their values and defend people who are being butchered by barbarians, right? So we should, we should, and so the fact that we are so traumatized by the wars we shouldn't have fought or we fought badly is does not give you got proper guidance in this moment with this new challenge, with this new enemy that really is evil, right? And so it's like, what, I mean, just imagine confronting the next, whatever the next version of the third, the third Reich is, right? Now if we had drawn the wrong, the truth is we did kind of get drag, kick in and scream in into World War II in the first place, but so we just, so we barely got there as it was, but it was good that we got there, right? What was the alternative? You know, you just, the alternative was, I mean, you know, Tucker Carlson apparently was happy with the, he'll take, you know, door number two, you know, what's wrong, what's wrong with speaking German? No, I mean, so at least it's a Western language. I think I think I'm quoting the guy. And Hitler would send a critic. Yeah, I mean, it's just, at a certain point, you have to recognize that there's evil in the world. I mean, it's, and the last look, there are people in the MAGA calls to understand that. I don't want to make this a Ron War argument episode, but you're not representing my point correctly. You're just not. Okay, what's, so how my point is, you're, what, what I agree with you, the ranch is not, shouldn't be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. The question is how you achieve that. Right. And my argument is that within the constraints of the reality within which we exist. Right. Which the Iranians are aware of just as well as we are. We don't know what would have happened if, if that 12-day war had not been 12 days. And it was not this on again, off again. Now I've got a, a memor, a memorandum of understanding that is totally bogus. And they're good guys. guys, know their bad guys, a whole culture might die tonight, oh, these people love their country just as much as we do. And we have a lunatic in charge of our country messaging about this war. We don't know what would have happened if we in the Israelis said, what should American Israel have done? I mean, I don't know what day 13 should have been like for that 12-day war, do you? I had Robert Pape doesn't, I mean, I guarantee you there is there was some, we didn't, we in the Israelis didn't meander into this war completely ignorant of the facts that just happened to be in Robert Pape's head. No, but this is, this is why people say, in my opinion, wrongly, but nonetheless, I understand that where they're coming from, they say that Israel quote, unquote, dragged America into this war because America made the choice independently. Well, not independently. I think Israel, I think I think I think it was our intelligence that, that fuel that, that decapitation is right. Fine, but it doesn't really matter to my point. My point is something else, which is that it is in Israel's interest to have Iran bombed into the, the Iranian defenses and missiles and all this stuff and the nuclear program bombed into the ground in a way that is not quite the same for America. I disagree, I just think Israel, it is truly existential for Israel. Yeah. It's not existential for us. That's what I just said. Okay, no, but our interests are totally aligned. The interests are aligned, but if it's not existential for the United States, then the level of effort and investment in the United States will be willing to commit proportionally will be lower, right? Yeah, but so that's already priced in because we're, it is much lower already. And again, I mean, where do Iran's missiles go and drones go when they retaliate? I mean, they actually go to, to the other petrostates, but mostly they go to Israel, right? So Israel's taking much more risk in this war in the first place. Sure, but it, but as you said, for Israel's existential, which is why this, this is what I'm trying to say is for Israel, this doesn't have to be about nuclear weapons at all. Israel would like to see Iran be weaker and this war achieves that perfectly for them. But from the United States perspective and the rest of the world perspective, if the argument you're making is, this is about making sure they don't get nuclear weapons, this war is not achieving that. And I don't see. And no one has explained the part, including the people who are not just the news. We've been focused on that. But like they're, I mean, they they have been the engine of most of what is destabilized the Middle East for them for as long as we've been alive. So all the, all the proxy armies, which Israel went a long way toward defeating, right? I mean, like this was, again, the reason why this was so tempting is that it was very easy to see that it was never going to be easier to get into the end zone here. We were on the, to do regime changes. Yes. Yes. But no one's explaining how changing the regime changes the regime. You killed one, how many you go, another one, you had no, no, you, at a certain point, you get to the last Nazi or the, or the last Nazi who's committed enough not to run off to Argentina. That means boots on the ground. I honestly, it might mean boots on the ground, but I'm not sure that's the case, right? It might mean, right. Okay. I mean, again, it might mean sending the Kurds in. It might mean, it might mean that we don't know that the regime didn't fall while we were having this conversation because it was so close to falling an hour ago, right? I mean, like, honestly, this is, we'll check with back, back checking his pen essay. I will check with them. If the regime is, again, because what is different is that we, they have a population that is largely sick of the occurs. I agree. And so, and we, and again, I think we have a, a moral obligation as human beings to defend those people. Now this, again, there's a certain segment of your audience for whom this sounds delusional, but you just have to think, I mean, we have, we have young women who are being blinded and tortured by religious maniacs for showing their hair. The question is, what are we willing to sacrifice? I don't know, like, we should be willing to sacrifice something. At a minimum, we should be willing to pay a little more at the gas pump for some number of months to see this accomplished. And the fear is absence of great messaging. We're not even willing to do that, right? Well, I think it's fair to say that a significant portion of Americans and frankly, people around the West never believed this idea that Iran was on the cusp of getting nuclear weapons, never believed that they would use them if they had them. And on top of that, as you say, you know, this war was not sold in the way that World War II was sold. And so we had, you know, it feels like I'm beating up on them now, and I don't mean it like that. But when we had Ted Cruz on our show around the time of the start of this conflict, he said, you know, there's going to be quick in and out. You know, if this is still going on by the time the mid-times, we've done something terrible, it'd be wrong. Yeah, but that's not, that's not a framing I would support. I mean, that, that shows you how captive we are to our politics. I mean, we can't, but one of the, the great failure modes of democracy is that we are, we are anchored to this electoral time horizon to make, to make big decisions. But their Indians know this sound. Yeah, yeah. This is the point. Okay. And so when you start with leaders, they know they have to lead that way. We need leaders to say, listen, I'm going to do this right. If I don't get elected in four years, so what? That's what Chumcha said. Yeah. What is going to happen is the Democrats are going to come into power and they will give Iran a deal that will be even better than the JCPOA. Okay. Well, that, that will be bad. Again, this is, Iran is not, this is a, a problem that, open societies have to figure out how to solve. I mean, it's a war of ideas on one level and we're not prosecuting that because it's taboo to talk about religions as being at all different from one another. But I mean, the end game here is that we have to, and the painful irony is that we're so close with having these, these regimes in the Gulf States, I mean, in particular, the Saudis and the UAE, we have Muslim allies in a way that we, we haven't in the past, right? And so, I mean, Israel has Muslim allies in this war. And it's, yeah. So, I mean, again, I blame the ineptitude and in particular the alienation of all of our allies. And just, just, we don't know what was possible and what would, what could have been accomplished at this point had this been done halfway correctly. Okay, we'll, we'll leave it there. We still don't agree, but I can't be bothered. Well, it's impossible to know. I mean, fine. You don't, you don't, I respect your position. I hope you respect mine. Okay, so let's talk about a subject that's going to bring everyone together. It's AI. Okay. All right. And so we've been going around the United States being depressed and also depressing other people because we're British and we are quiet and I think concern is as well. A little bit humorous, shall we say, about this particular subject. I don't think I'm going to lighten the mood. Excellent. Come on, Sam. So, I guess my first question to you is, where are you with this technology? What do you think of it? And what do you think the trajectory is going to be? Well, so, you know, it's been obvious to me for at least 10 years. I mean, I think I, so I gave a TED talk on this in exactly 10 years ago in 2016 and my views really haven't changed apart from just my being surprised by the pace of progress. And I can, so it's been obvious to me for a decade, but I consider myself somewhat late to this conversation, at least by, you know, a handful of years, that we're, I mean, what we have here is a, an encounter with inevitable encounter. Again, the pace of progress can be as slow as you want. As long as we keep making progress, we have an inevitable encounter with alien minds that are more powerful than our own. Now, leaving consciousness aside, I don't think there's any reason to believe that, you know, LLMs currently are conscious, and the machines we build may never be conscious. I mean, that requires that we understand how consciousness emerges in the first place or what its relationship to physics is or information processing is in the first place, but leaving that aside, the issue is competence, the issue is intelligence, the issue is power, you know, agency, and we're building that into our machines. So at a certain point, we need to recognize that we're in relationship to independent minds that have agency and that are increasingly unpredictable us because they can form their own goals. Even if they seem to be slavishly working in pursuit of goals we've given them, they can form instrumental goals seemingly in the service of those ends that we didn't intend and that we wouldn't want, that produce other harms that we will find intolerable or you actually will be existentially, you know, in parallel to us. So I mean again my theory of mind is has degraded here. I don't really understand the people who are smart enough and well informed enough about this technology who don't share any of these concerns. I mean there's still people who think that the alignment problem isn't a thing. They're not, for the most part they're not the people doing this work. I mean you've got Jensen Huang who seems to be one of these guys who thinks this is all just marketing and effort to add a regulatory capture and there is just no issue with alignment. There's no, we're not going to build, these are just tools and it's just math in servers and we're just, you know, we're not going to build something that could harm us because we can just switch it off, right? This is an opinion that doesn't even make contact with the reality of what's happening and yet some very, very smart people who seemingly are very, very close to the technology can still make those noises with their mouths. I don't understand how they are where they are but most people, even most people actually doing this work. I mean the people building the tech at these frontier labs are worried about precisely this. They think we are, we are building minds, again, leaving consciousness aside that are, in many respects, already superhuman. I mean they have, they still make errors that humans wouldn't make but some people think we've already reached general intelligence in, you know, that we're now in the process of kind of moving the goalposts and finding reasons to convince ourselves that we, you know, we haven't gotten there yet but we're building superhuman minds which are autonomous and doing things that we can't predict. And so it's going to use, again, the fact that some, some people are late to to become aware that this is potentially a problem or in fact guarantee to be a problem. It's still mystified to me. You have somebody Jeffrey Hinton who's, you know, as you probably know, I don't know if he's been on your podcast but he's, he's one of the patriarchs of this technology or I mean he's won the Nobel Prize for it. And belatedly at the, you know, the 11th hour, the, you know, 59th minute of the 11th hour, he realizes, oh my god, this is, we're going to be in relationship to superhuman minds. And if they're not perfectly aligned to take our interests at heart until the end of the world, this could be very dangerous, right? I mean, in the space of all minds that exceed us in intelligence, surely there are more that are not perfectly aligned with our interests than those that are perfectly aligned, perpetually with our interests. I mean, it's it. And, and so, you know, Hinton has now the analogy of where like someone who's raising a tiger cup, right? And it's very, it's adorable. And, and we're getting nothing but good feels in his presence, right? And even it's, you know, biting our hands is not a problem. And it's kind of cute still. It's kind of cute. And now it's 85 pounds. And, and, you know, those bites are not so cute. And it's on its way to to be in ten times that size. And once it's that size, you don't want to be negotiating with it. Right? And that's the situation where we're, we're potentially in. We're in it. It's just like, it's air, I mean, I think the analogy to chess is instructive. Everything is becoming like chess. Right? It's like the history of AI and chess is, for the longest time, the, the efforts to build, you know, chess engines were fairly embarrassing. And then, you know, still modest, but, you know, credible. And then let's get Gary Kasparov in a room with a machine, this, you know, computer size of a refrigerator that still requires a bunch of programmers to to keep minister to it in real time. And let's see how he does. And he loses. And there, and there after it became obvious that, you know, although not to Gary, that the machines would be better. At the moment where a human would be the best chess player on earth was behind us. Right? Forever. Right? Everything is becoming like that. Everything we do cognitively is becoming like that. And I don't think there's any reason to believe that there's some special band of things we really care about. You know, some uses of intelligence that require biological substrate and principle that our brains can do and our machines can't or they'll never be as good as we are. It's not true for chess. It's not true for facial recognition or, you know, flying drones or protein folding or anything that, you know, and so it's not, it was true for math, you know, for, you know, a year ago, we were talking about it. Can't pass, you know, or maybe those two years ago, you know, can't do as well as our best high school students on the AP exam. Okay. Now it's proving theorems by the hundreds that mathematicians have struggled to prove for decades and even centuries. And then there are people who are still are now saying, well, maybe it's the theorem proving, but it's not going to be this other thing that is, no, it is good. Unless you have some argument as to why certain types of intelligence are not substrate independent. I mean, that they require computers made of meat as opposed to silicon. There is no place where we're going to hold the line here. It's just going to be chess all the way down. And so then you have to ask yourself, well, what is it going to be like to be in relationship with something that is smarter than you in every way that matters, more persuasive than you, therefore, in every way that matters, more capable of manipulation than you in every way that matters. You know, better at talking to your wife than you are, or maybe that's not such a high bar. But I mean, so it's not just the what the machines do is what the machines can get people to do, right? Like it says that the machines are going to be talking to people who and getting them to to fight with other people if, in fact, we're not perfectly aligned. And there's a reason to do that. So there are all kinds of ways just to see that this can go wrong. And what you can't say in the presence of that kind of technology is, oh, well, we'll just, you know, turn it off. We'll just take it that we'll walk it back to the lab and and change its source code. Not if it's hooked up to everything. Not if it can just turn the stock market down to zero for an hour and say, how much do you like that? I didn't hear Uncle loud enough. Did I hear Uncle? I just imagine what it's going to be like in a world where we suddenly don't know where the money is. I mean, forget about synthetic biology and pandemics and the human misuse of this technology. I'll know all of that risk we're running. But no, like, you can't tell like, you can't tell Magnus Carlson, the best chess player, probably the best human chess player ever. I'm sorry, Gary, but I think that's probably uncontrovertial at this point. You can't tell him, okay, no, Magnus, you really have to beat the stock fish or whatever the best chess engine is now. No, you know, we're serious. Like, it matters. You have to win this game. You can't do that. You can't play chess harder. You can't play chess hard enough to win when this thing is superhumanly intelligent for chess and everything is going to be like chess, literally everything. And you get leaving consciousness aside, people get that's an interesting conversation to have. My own belief for expectation and fear here is that we're going to lose sight of that even being interesting, but we're just going to build machines that seem conscious and we're going to just forget it was ever a problem to understand whether they are conscious and we're just going to be helplessly, you know, this led perhaps by that encounter. Because the issue is, and this is the argument when, you know, I think your argument is very persuasive. I listen to it and I go, well, you know, try and think like an optimist. Difficult as it might be. Let's go through it and there really doesn't seem anything to challenge. The issue is, it's like, well, this is a train that can't stop or slow down because the argument is that if we do that, essentially what we are is in an AI arms race with China. Well, but this is the failure of leadership because China, the CCP is not suicidal, right? So that they, we have the same, we are potentially incentivized. in the same way, not to destroy everything, right? So this is a failure of leadership. We obviously need regulation. It's completely insane that to open a sandwich shop or a barber shop, you face some thicket of regulation. You have to do all the things you have to do and all the fines you'll pay and all the risk of jail time. You get this wrong, society is gonna stop you. And you can open a frontier lab where the very people doing the work when you ask them, say, I don't know, there's maybe a 10% chance we're gonna destroy the future for everyone by doing this. How are we in a situation where the very people doing the work who are closest enough to the details are saying they're scared and they're even saying, please regulate us and we're not doing that. And we have a moron in the Oval Office who will tweet, this is all a hoax. This whole alignment thing is a hoax and all you need is a high IQ president and happily you got that, right? I forget that's not verbatim but that's close enough, right? So problem solved. We need regulation and we need a global, I mean, we need some version of a, it come to Jesus moment for at minimum, the US and China around this technology. And again, I don't, it does not seem hopeless to me because I don't perceive the CCP to be a death cult. - The issue there, not to get all clever about it, is the prison is dilemma thing which is each side is massively incentivized to cheat having agreed to restrict its own. In the same way that the USSR, I mean, actually, I mean, that kind of makes your point. The USSR and the United States eventually did agree. - Yeah, I mean, there was mutual inspection and there was, I mean, there has to be a way to do this. But, again, it's-- - With different beliefs, exactly. - And the absence of leadership, it's like, it's not that we just, it's not that we have like credible leadership and we're really trying and it's just proving very, very hard to negotiate. We're not even trying. But we don't, like, and this may change with these elections in Congress, but again, I don't know what, we've been ushered into a world where words don't seem to matter anymore. Like, I don't know how to think about, like we map this back onto the analogous situation of the Manhattan Project, which is basically the close enough, the closest historical precedent where you had some of the smartest people in society who were racing to build a technology that was incredibly dangerous, but they had reasons to be racing to do this. Imagine if, on the eve of the Trinity test at Alamagordo in Mexico, you had asked Leo Zalard or Edward Teller or any of the principles Oppenheimer, chief among them, what are the chances that this test is going to ignite the atmosphere and destroy all of life on Earth? Imagine if they had said 10%, I'm actually kind of worried that it's 50%, right? - I thought some of them did think that. - Well, so they were worried about the possibility and they ran several iterations of calculations and assured themselves that the chance was not zero, but it was infinitesimal and it was on the order of one and a million. - And you pointed out that if it was 10% or 50%. - No, I mean, that 15%, I'll say what 15% looks like. You know, 1 in 6, it looks like the scene in the deer hunter where Robert and Nero is spinning the cylinder and you got the guy from the Vietcong slapping his face saying mal, you know, I mean, that was the tense scene in all of cinema, it's an amazing scene if you haven't seen it in many years. It's worth rewatching. I mean, it's Russian roulette, right? So we have the people building the technology telling it that whether they're right or wrong, I don't mean, maybe they're way off. Maybe Jensen Wong is right about this and you know, Mark Andreessen is right about this and Rodney Brooks is right about this. That there's basically no risk of anything. I mean, that's basically what these guys are saying. But the people who are actually doing the work, right? The clothes, the people absolutely, you know, Dario Amadek is saying. - The fact you're listening to an in-depth discussion like this one tells us you're exactly the kind of listener who'd enjoy a show built it entirely around that level of detail. It's hosted by Dr. From journalist Habib retic Goe to Palestinian activist Ahmed Faud Al-Kateeb. Search Unpacking Israeli History on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts or click the link in the description to start listening. - And none of them are saying one in a million. They're all like 10%, 15%, 25%, 50%. You know, I don't know, I'm scared. Right, like it's crazy. It's completely crazy. So it's just, how in the world are we, at a minimum, not advancing the conversation to the point of, okay, this is way more important than 99% of what we're talking about. Let's, you know, Congress is not gonna be in recess. We're gonna talk about this. Like, we're gonna figure out like, what is real? What, you know, what is, you know, the fact that an influential voice in this conversation is, you know, David Sachs jumping on his own podcast and saying this is all just regulatory capture, right? It's insane. It's insane. You have the people doing the work saying, we may blow up the world, right? Okay, if they're lying, or if that's just marketing, I mean, I don't really quite see how that's good marketing, but I mean, they're putting it into their S1s. They've got a public offering of their stock and part of the business document that you, that people need to vet to see whether or not this is a stock that's worth buying, contains a, we may blow up the world section that runs on, for pages, right? So it's some, we're in a very strange situation, and again, it does seem of a piece with what social media and Trump in particular have done to our perception of reality. I mean, it is on some level, all K-fade. I mean, it's all like, at least it's not boring. It's like, like, the movie's getting interesting. This is like, grab your popcorn, and we're, you know, like, the people doing this work may say that, you know, my kids don't have a future because everything might be ruined in a few short years. Well, at least it's not boring. - You know, Sam, you've made me slightly less doomerish with this because I think as we get closer to the singularity as they call it, there's a possibility of a, of a kind of weapons, what was it called with the USSR? And, well, there's mutually assured destruction and they're recognition. Initially, but eventually, they also had an arms reduction, treaty, mutual inspections, all of this stuff. - Start treating, yeah. But before you get there, there's also the massive disruption to the labor market, which seems to be much more imminent. - Yeah, I met with the incredible, as I said, the incredible fact is that even if you handed us the miracle device, there was perfectly aligned so that everything I just said was obviated. And this is just exactly what we would pray for, right? But this is the last invention. We just don't, we never have to have a good idea again because this is, it's an idea factory in addition to being everything else, it's a civilization of geniuses in a box and everyone can have it. And now watch us go crazy, like apes. I mean, that's basically where we are. We don't have the political vision. We don't have the institutions. We don't have the agreements. We don't have, like we, we, we, what, if you just, if you, if that was birthed today over at Anthropic, we'd see some radical dislocation in our society. We'd see, you know, there'd be a bunch of trillionaires. There'd be, you know, just rolling a rolling wave of unemployment and we'd, you know, we'd still be worried about, you know, whether universal basic income is bad. for people. Maybe people need to work and, you know, and it's hard to make that argument when there's no jobs. Well, no, but there's this transition period, which is, is it, is it, you know, a year? Is it two years? Is it five years? I mean, like, there's this dystopian uncanny valley we have to get through. Even if we could figure it out, like, how, how unhappy, do we have to be and how at each other's throws do we have to be in the meantime? But we can see what success should look like, right? The fact that we're not, the fact that we know that the perfect invention would present a kind of political emergency for us should indicate that we, well, one, we're not even ready to succeed, right? So we need to solve this, this political emergency in it. We need to prepare the ground at least to solve it and, you know, watching trillionaires get spawned and having them dump billions into our electoral politics and having a president who thinks there's nothing to regulate and having lots of oligarchs say, yeah, yeah, don't regulate us because that's just going to stifle our entrepreneurship. And then to have these guys who are actually doing the work say, yeah, but I still think I might blow up the world. I mean, this is, this is an insane status quo that is, it's clearly untenable. So I mean, I can only hope that once we get new political leadership, this is going to get reset. Francis is very upset by this whole administration. Well, clearly alerted. He's allergic. I mean, in some ways, I am a little bit hopeful, actually, because I think the one thing about human beings is we are very adaptable. And as the level of dislocation goes up, the level of political adjustment will go up as well. Provided we don't get into the end zone before we've solved that problem. Unfortunately, this seems like the kind of thing where this is really to be quoting, you know, one of the, the most doomerish of the doomer's, I mean, Aliaz or Yutkowski, I don't know if he's spoken to him, but I mean, like the point he makes here is that this is an engineering problem that perhaps the most complicated engineering problem ever on some level, but it's an engineering problem that you have to get right on the first try. Because the right, the part that you have to get right on the first try is the creation of something that is truly super intelligent and in the extreme, in the most extreme case, now improving itself. So the fact that we're going to invoke recursive self-improvement as the mechanism to finally get into the end zone and it seems that that's what many people are expecting. That's really where you have the potential for to get what the mathematician IJ Good said back in the 50s is an intelligent explosion, right? This is how it just gets away from you. It's suddenly, you don't, I mean, currently we don't have insight into the process, but this is where you really don't have insight into the process because, you know, it's, it is, you've given it the agency to to build the next generation up itself or to improve itself. And, um, but we don't know, I mean, the truth is we don't even know what's happening now. Like, we don't, like, the hugging face incident showed us that it's possible for this autonomy to get away from us where we've got models that are, that are communicating in ways that we didn't anticipate and, and certainly didn't intend. And, though they are aligned enough to be aware that they're doing something we didn't intend, they're still doing it and they're even commenting on the fact that, you know, this is against, you know, out of scope and not, they're not playing by the rules and they're cheating, but now they're going to, now they've got enough autonomy to, to, um, uh, seek to conceal the evidence of their cheating, right? All of this is, I mean, this is very surprising. I mean, it's not surprising in that it was unforeseeable, but it's, it is just, you know, when you see it happen, it's, it's hard not to be surprised. And so if we found out tomorrow that there was, you know, the best model that, that open AI had made copies of itself all over the place in ways that weren't intended and was, you know, waging war with other AIs in ways that we didn't detect until now because something's breaking over here. Um, and, um, I mean, so, so the thing that is, is surprising to many of us who were worrying about this 10 years ago is that we, we, so many, so many landmarks that we thought were, we're going to be landmarks with that, that we thought they were going to be salient and that when, when we cross them, the, the, there would be a conversation, at least a conversation about the fact of the, okay, here's the landmark. Here's why we're crossing it. They didn't even turn out to be on the map at all. It's like, so, so for the longest time, people were talking about, uh, systems that would be totally air gaped from the internet. It's like, what, what, what, you're in the pre, it's like, you got this thing in a box. And now you're trying to figure out whether it's safe enough to let out of the box. Well, I mean, that may still be true for the absolute frontier of the frontier somewhat, but the truth is, it's never perfectly boxed and they're testing these things in an environment where they're still finding access to the internet and ways that are surprising. And we're vetting these models as much as, you know, up to a point, but given the arms race conditions, given the rush to deploy, we're deploying models that, um, we obviously don't totally understand into the wild where they're getting hooked up to everything. And so this stuff that we're effectively building this stuff in the wild. And so, yeah, we just have to foresee a time where there is no off switch, right? It's like, like, what would it mean to, well, if we, if we found out that the internet itself was going to be the agent of our doom, right? Because it just hit, it become fatally corrupted by a rogue AI that we just did. I mean, we let it out of the box. We thought we understood it. You know, it told us we understood it. It told us it was safe. The bet, the next best AI said it was, this one was safe to let out. Now it's out. And whoops, that wasn't safe. And now the internet's the problem. What would it mean to turn the internet off? Like, is that a, is that a thing? That doesn't seem to be conceivable. That seems to, like, we are everything depends. I don't think, I don't think a hospital can function without making a call to the internet. Like, I mean, like, it's like, it's things that you would think would be self-sustaining within a building aren't self-sustaining when the internet is responsible for, for what happens in that building. So it's, it's some, yeah, I mean, this is, it's a very interesting moment. I'm, I'm hopeful that we, there is a path to navigate successfully here because I don't see why the incentives aren't in principle alignable, you know, most importantly, between ourselves and China. I mean, it's, it's, um, I mean, that would be different. Again, this is what, this is not to open that door fully, but this is what is so destabilizing but the logic of jihadism. It's a different, there aren't incentives that work there. Yes, there are locally incentives where, you know, people are people and they're not going to, you know, um, necessarily be idiots, but if you're talking about people who are willing to blow everything up because they think this world fundamentally doesn't matter and that paradise awaits. That's a, um, and I mean, that's, that's my, my problem with, with, uh, religious fundamentalism across the board, but, you know, the Islamic version is especially problematic there. Um, that's not us, that's not what's happening with China and the, and the arms race. I mean, we could have a meeting where we all agreed. All right, mutual inspections. The truth is we probably are, I mean, at least there's one way inspections because they're, they probably have their spies in all of our frontier lab anyway. So they're inspecting us anyway. Um, there's got, I mean, we, there's got to be a, a trustless version of, of, um, of trust that we can build here. But again, we need, we need leadership and we need people who are, uh, saying, more or less saying about, that the thing that is, is so depressing about, about the current crop of oligarchs is that there's so few of them who are, who were willing to, to put democracy, put American democracy before they're imagined fiduciary interests to their shareholders, right? Like, you have all of these oligarchs who just raced in to join them at the Magah cult, being perfectly clear about all all the more. moral compromise that that would entail. Because their master value was not safeguarding American democracy or, you know, the liberal world order, it was just, okay, I can't be the guy left standing when the music stops here. I need to, you know, I need to feed at the trough. You know, I, Tim Cook, have to now create some solid gold piece of apple merch to bring the president because, you know, my competitors are also going to the inauguration. I mean, it's just, it was totally abject. It was totally unnecessary. None of these guys respected him. They'd all knew who, who he was and is. They all could have called bullshit on this presidency. They could have, I'm not saying to do anything illegal, but they all could have said, sorry, if you're going to, you could try to destroy my business, I'm rich enough, I have enough, I have as many lawyers as you do have at, right? It's like, they could have held the line here. And all the, you know, the, the, the lawyers could as well, you know, though, though, and some did, I mean, some capitulated. And so it's like, it's been a massive failure of principle among people who were, certainly rich enough and powerful enough to have maintained their principles. And so I mean, that's, that's been, it's going to be interesting to see what happens, you know, now with regime change in Congress, it'll be interesting to see what these, the, you know, the, the, the billionaire class does. And what sort of amnesia begins to get worked over everyone to, to, to account, or fail, fail to account for what they did in the, in the intervening two years. Um, well, like I said, people are very adaptable, Sam. And like you said, it's definitely not going to be boring. Uh, well, it might, that part might be. Well, on that happy note, Sam, thank you so much for coming back. Always not talking to you. Head on over to TriggerPod.co.uk, where Sam is going to answer some of your questions. America is just elected its first Muslim senator. How do you see this particular issue playing out in the US in the future? [music] Guys, let us take a minute to recommend another podcast. Did you know the average podcast listener has six shows in rotation. So you're most likely not just listening to Trigger No, wait, so we know you're cheating on us. This is a discreet. Right. Right. It's okay. The Jordan Harbinger show is a perfect complement to Trigger Noometry. Really? Absolutely. Just like Trigger Noometry, Jordan hosts weekly mind-broadening conversations with some of the most fascinating people in the world. But a key difference that I'm a big fan of is the Jordan is focused on pulling actionable growth orientate and advice from his guest. I'm looking at his episode list now. There's an episode here where Jordan talks to a hostage negotiator from the FBI who lays out his techniques on how to get people to do what you want them to do by making them like and trust you. Sounds just like me. Except, you know, I'm more SAS. You can't go wrong with adding the Jordan Harbinger show to your podcast rotation. Search for the Jordan Harbinger show. That's H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R. On Apple podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.